NASA's new assignments: Find aliens, prove evolution

And while the agency is at it, officials should 'search for life's origin'

The National Space and Aeronautics Administration has done some amazing things for the United States over the years: the initial short flights into space, then the longer orbiting missions, the moon visits, the space station and even unmanned trips to every sidewalk in the solar system.

But now it has some new goals: Find aliens.

And prove evolution.

And while the agency is at it, its staff members should identify the origins of life.

That’s according to the new – and very religious – marching orders the agency was given just weeks ago.

“On March 21 of this year, both parties in Congress and the Trump administration made a change to a federal document that amounted to only a few words, but which may well change the course of human history.

“Every few years, Congress and the administration pass a NASA Authorization Act, which gives the U.S. Space Agency its marching orders for the next few years. Amongst the many pages of the 2017 NASA Authorization Act (S. 422) the agency’s mission encompasses expected items such as continuation of the space station, building of big rockets, indemnification of launch and reentry service providers for third party claim and so on.

“But in this year’s bill, Congress added a momentous phrase to the agency’s mission: ‘the search for life’s origins, evolution, distribution, and future in the universe.’ It’s a short phrase, but a visionary one, setting the stage for a far-reaching effort, that could have as profound an impact on the 21st century as the Apollo program had on the 20th.”

At the NASA Watch bog, Keith Cowing noted the law itself states, “The administrator shall enter into an arrangement with the National Academies to develop a science strategy for astrobiology that would outline key scientific questions, identify the most promising research in the field, and indicate the extent to which the mission priorities in existing decadal surveys address the search for life’s origin, evolution, distribution, and future in the universe.”

Atlantic speculated on the meaning of the change, noting it will include a new emphasis on the question of whether there are other life forms in the universe.

“In the last decade … we have made enormous advances in the field of exoplanet studies. Telescopes on the ground have become sensitive enough to discern the faintest stellar ‘wobbles,’ as orbiting planets tug gently against the gravitational bonds. With the National Science Foundation’s Atacama Large Millimeter Array, and the Hubble Space Telescope, we have peered into interstellar clouds where new planets are forming and have detected the presence of all the elements necessary for life.”

It noted that just last February, a nearby star system was confirmed to have seven planets orbiting, three of which “lie with the star’s ‘Goldilocks zone,’ making them potentially habitable.”

There have been multiple reports of planets that possibly could sustain life. What’s thought to be needed for life – water and energy sources – have been located even on Saturn’s moon, Enceladus.

And just last June, the New York Times said, “Yes, there have been aliens.”

Even so, the mystery still remains about life on earth, and the report places its faith in the still-unexplained idea that somehow, somewhere, sometime, something turned from inanimate matter into living tissue.

On its own.

“Every worm on a deep sea vent, or cactus eking out an existence in the high Andres, every human who hunted on the plains or stood on the moon owes their existence to a single chance meeting of two cells that learned to get along,” it continued.

And the move is being viewed by those in the faith community as the federal government’s endorsement of an effort to prove the biblical creation narrative false.

The work already had begun.

The Atlantic reported: “NASA has been putting in place all the necessary building blocks to make the Search for Life possible. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), due to launch in late 2018, will begin following up on recently discovered exoplanets, searching for ‘the fingerprints of life,’ gases that scientists believe can only exist in the presence of living organisms. And NASA and private industry have embarked on ambitious new rockets capable of carrying probes and landers to Europa [one of Jupiter’s moons which is encrusted in ice], and launching future telescopes capable of finding and characterizing continents and oceans on Earth-like planets. Soon, they will be able to send (human) geologists and biologists to Mars.”

At least the marching orders are a change from what ex-President Barack Obama wanted from NASA.

According to the Telegraph, “Charles Bolden, a retired United States Marines Corps major-general and former astronaut, said in an interview with al-Jazeera that NASA was not only a space exploration agency but also an ‘Earth improvement agency.'”

Bolden said: “When I became the NASA administrator, he [Obama] charged me with three things. One, he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.”